Reach: Dossiers
by skywalker05
Summary: Moments of silence, the origin of Jun's tattoo, and Emile's sibling rivalry with death. One story for each member of Noble Team. Mild Six/Jorge and Carter/Kat.
1. Warrior Spirit: Emile

A/N: Dossiers-short stories- will be issued for each member of Noble Team, for five in total (Six will be lumped in with Jorge. Yes.). Genres and lengths will vary. If you see anywhere I should have fact-checked either the Halo-verse or real life military protocol, please point it out nicely.

**Dossier 1:** Emile-A239

_Summary: _ Emile is not an artist, unless you define an artist as someone who conforms the world to how they see it. The skull mark and the death of Thom-Noble Six.

_Security Warning: Rated T for brief but icky violence.

* * *

_

_ Vengeful Spirit _

The first part of the skull was a long, gray scratch in front of his left eye. It came from an Elite's claws; the thing was _right there, _because Emile had broken its other arm and taken its sword, so it couldn't do much else except charge him and scrape its gloves off trying to make a dent in his helmet.

Emile tried to trigger the sword, but the u-shaped handle wasn't made by human hands, and the Elite knocked him backward before he could get a grip with all his fingers. He hit the ground on his shoulder, cushioned by the gel of his armor. Another Elite loomed behind him, slammed its foot down on his hand, and took the sword from his stinging fingers.

Emile cursed. The common radio channel was filled with shouts and gunfire, although UNSC command had their own quiet channel, silence except for regular reports on Kat's progress with the bomb.

He pulled the kukri from its shoulder holster and stabbed the second alien in the foot, the knife point thudding into the ash-gray dirt beneath. The beam sword flared over his head in a wild swing, but Emile rolled and got to his feet. When the Elite stepped again to swing and flinched over its severed toe, Emile ducked under its arm. Its hooting battlecry echoed between the ruined buildings and inside his helmet. He grabbed a spur of blue-purple armor at its back and stabbed into the soft stuff between the plates, where a human would have kidneys.

The scratch on his helmet was really distracting him. The Elite sagged, and Emile grabbed its sword arm and heaved. It cut off the second Elite's right arm and two of its mandibles before the two collapsed together, propped up as if they were embracing.

He pushed past the feebly stirring bodies, pausing to recouch his knife and salvage the beam sword. The Elite with the maimed face, coating the ground with dirt-flecked blue blood, tried to talk at him.

Emile flexed his fingers and activated the sword. It was easy enough to operate with Spartan hands once he got the chance to look at it well enough.

That scratch was far too irritating. Emile tapped his left hand against his helmet, trying to get the camera out beyond the glass to feed again. _It's like having something in my eye._

The Elite hooted again.

"Quiet, ugly." Emile kicked it and moved on.

**The next time ** the team was all together and quiet was on the cruiser where they held Six's funeral. Marines stood at parade rest around the hanger, probably glad for the break after the battle where Thom had lost his life and the aliens had shown just how hard they were to kill. The name "Elites" was sticking. The Spartans were scattered about the scene like color-coded action figures. Most of Noble Team had taken their helmets off for comfort and for the marines. The official ceremony was over, but Thom's sealed coffin had not yet been given its burial at space. Emile worked at the scratch with his knife, expanding it. Might as well expend his twitchiness somewhere if he was gonna have to replace the visor anyway.

Carter, blue helmet held under his arm, walked across the deck and stood in front of Emile. "You okay?"

"I got the cameras working. Don't even see the scratch."

"I meant Thom."

"I'll hold together, commander. It's you bleeding hearts that've still got to figure out how war works."

Carter looked a little disgusted. "Right. Sergeant Roarke sends his condolences."

"Any of 'em spill that bull about Spartans not being able to die while they're looking at the coffin?"

Carter turned away. "You're a fine human being, Emile."

"You too, sir."

He watched Carter walk away and almost nicked his hand when he caught the curvature of the helmet with his knife. He started making a circle with the grain.

The marines were only here to spectate. They wanted to learn what Spatan MIA meant. It meant a coffin filled with pieces. Emile pictured a human soldier he'd found dead on the ground soon after he'd taken out the two Elites together. The face looked pale, and he'd had to look for a moment to tell pliant skin from the hard white surface of visible skull in the middle of the bloody patch.

He'd heard the live marines talking quietly as they filled this room.

"I thought you couldn't kill Spartans. That's why they get over all the controversy and make 'em."

"I heard they're just kids."

"It'd be less freaky if they showed their faces more."

"Some people call them death's heads in Mexico. _Guerrillas muertos."_

Emile stood and walked toward the short line of mourners, keeping his helmet under his arm and staring straight ahead. The Nobles were arranged around the coffin. The marines stood straight and quiet as Emile passed, but their eyes shifted to his face. He wanted one to step out.

He wanted some bullheaded soldier to decide to be brash and say 'So you _aren't _invincible,' and Emile would look down at the top of his head and say 'You're the death's head, little man. You're gonna be killed off out there and it's our masks the Covvies see and think _this _is what humans look like.'

No one gave him the satisfaction. Emile turned and joined Noble's vigil. Thom had tried to be a cowboy, but he was a useful soldier, and Emile would mourn him.

He knew what he'd been scratching on his helmet now too.

* * *

**Such a short **time later, on Reach, he stood in a canyon and watched Carter's Pelican fly overhead. The commander was going to die.

The new member of the team, whom Emile thought alternatively of as girl Six, new Six, or mostly-useful Six, paused and looked up too. The same resignation he felt showed in the slump of her shoulders. Smart newbie—but then, how did a soldier not learn fast when two Spartans had been killed already?

_Oh, sorry, I mean Missing In Action._

They didn't need to say anything, and he didn't think there was much point. They slogged on, the muzzles of their guns twitching upward at any sound that might be a swarm. At the end, Emile saw Carter fireball out, giving the skull-face of the cave crevice a sudden orange eye. He watched the explosion settle, because if all you have left to give someone is letting the fire of their passing burn itself for one red descent of seconds onto your retinas, then you better give them that.

He thought of paying respect to Carter by taking his helmet off, but it wasn't safe, and the closest you ever got to someone was seeing the skull behind their face anyway—


	2. Clever Spirit: Kat

**Dossier 2: Catharine-B320 **

_Summary: _ Four times Kat felt out of control.

_Security Warning: _Rated K+. Same thing applies here as in all of them: if I've gotten a fact wrong, correct it nicely. **EDIT: **Also, please, this is not a technical manual. If you're going to tell me what procedure or what bit part character's name I've gotten wrong, please also tell me something about the _writing _so that your review is useful to me in the long run.

* * *

_ Clever Spirit _

She floated out of her body like a ghost.

That's what it felt like, anyway, as six-year-old Kat watched her parents leading _some other child _away across the lawn toward their house. Its stubby little fingers clutched her mother's, occasionally flinching away and returning with tentative pats when Kat's mother's stone bracelet slid over the top of its tiny knuckles. "What are they—" but the army man put one gloved hand on Kat's shoulder and she shied away from the thick-glassed window of the truck. She had learned in her school that work got finished best if you focused on it. She was a very focused child, and the task she had to do right now was to stay with this car and go with the, the man in green had called them "nice army men" but then the woman in white with the severe eyebrows had said "we're not nice, Reynolds", and Kat had been shooed into the truck, climbing onto the ledge with all the focus she could muster.

But _mama_! "That's not _me!" _Kat banged her little fists against the glass as the car rumbled and started moving down the dirt road. She looked at the black hair on the back of the child's head and wanted so bad to be where it was standing. "I'm here, mama, I'm here!" Where were they taking her? "Mama—"

Her eyes started to water. _Focus, focus, focus._

_ Mama_! She beat the window again, looking for a way out, but between her and the double doors there were a lot of army men in this truck. They were mostly big guys the size of her uncles, sitting on benches with their knees at her eye level. (A lot of marines for one child.)

"It's a clone," said a woman in green quietly. "They'll never miss you."

Another army man grumbled, "It's just gonna die. We can't make 'em right."

"Don't say that in front of the kid."

The woman in white was sitting in the passenger's seat behind a green, hanging mesh cordon. She looked back at them all, and Kat would have gone toward her but there was mesh and a guy's leg in the way.

The woman said, "She has to learn things, Reynolds. Where she's going…" but then the woman's eyebrows got not so severe and Kat sat down on her clear spot on the bench. _We're going somewhere important. I can go where other kids can't because I have focus._ The woman's face settled from stern to concerned, and then she turned back to face front again.

But t ahe idea of "other kids" hit Kat with the realization that she was being taken away again, and her parents wouldn't even know she was gone and crying and fighting became more important than anything else for a while. Reynolds just sat next to her and shifted while the others held out arms and legs and tried to pick her up so she couldn't get to the door. She beat and bit and only succeeded in hurting her own arms and scuffing the occasional green sleeve.

Eventually, she got too tired to fight and curled up on the bench and sniffled.

She was introduced, with the group of other children who would become Beta Company, to her new life in the army. It took a while on Reach, getting used to the training camp and the cafeteria and the bunks, but one day she felt like her ghost was back in her body again. Finally she could walk around in groups of other kids without her mind's eye giving the back of everybody's head the black, spiky hair that _other child _had sported.

* * *

**She was fourteen **and this was going to be _awesome._ The minute she could move again, the excitement pulled her up off the bed, and she was about to say _did you do it yet _when the world tipped over and Kat, most recent entrant into the SPARTAN physical enhancement program, fell over onto her newly augmented right bicep and fainted from the pain.

When she woke up again, it was back to focused, soldier Kat, and she took stock before she sat up. Medics lurked around her with glowing data screens, talking quietly. Kat searched with her watering eyes beneath their masks and then behind the translucent operating room walls, but Kurt Ambrose was nowhere to be seen.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

"Catherine," said the voice of the man who'd put her under.

"Sir."

They started tests—could she see, could she move. It took hours, and then they released her back to the dormitory.

The scene there was chaotic, people getting used to bodies that moved faster and were stronger than they'd had before. Some sat down and looked sad; others started to spar, usually knocking things over in the process. Kat looked around for friendly faces. Min wasn't inside, so she went out into the hallway again looking for her, remembering grimly that the Spartan-IIIs were supposed to have a 100% survival rate, but that the Spartan-IIs had only forty-four percent of their company survive to combat readiness…

She shoved the door closed with her foot, and it slammed with unexpected force. She cursed, feeling like a puppy with feet too big for its limbs. Then she stopped, blinking and not really seeing the pristine hall, only then realizing that she was upset. The augmentation was supposed to make her feel invincible. At worst it was routine, like field-stripping a weapon. But everything looked so _bright _that she wanted to squint, but her eyelids felt prickly and heavy. She plucked at the thin skin, feeling it snap back. That would be the anesthetics. Her bones ached. She hoped that she could do her best for UNSC with the new body. For now, it felt like a handicap.

She learned all the scientific names for what been done to her. Debriefings told them that it was normal to feel disoriented afterward. Spartans were pumped full of one set of drugs to make them aggressive, and another set to counter them. The right chemical mixture was supposed to keep them from going crazy. (After she joined Noble Team, Kat sometimes thought that Emile was what happened when you didn't take your little white pills as a kid.) Spartan test subjects were scrubbed of all the serotonin and testosterone and estrogen the human body can live without, and they were raised in such close quarters that it was no big deal to see somebody else's body, no matter what gender they were. But they were, all their human and AI teachers said, still human. So Kat, and the others, adjusted.

But she always judged herself against the feeling she'd had at that door. She never wanted to be that out of control of her mind and her body again.

* * *

**They said, "We'll** have to amputate," in more words than that, and she said "Do people really _do that _in 2552?" and they didn't pay any attention because they thought she was too far out on tranqs. She could vaguely remember slamming into the hard-packed earth as Spartans and Covenant fought around her. Thom had limped but had picked up the bomb from where it had rolled onto the ground beside her. She remembered the explosion, and then another Elite had dashed out and she'd tried to hit it with her elbow, but her arm wasn't working and there wasn't a lot of blood there any more but there was a whole glistening circle of it on the ground around her, and she'd collapsed onto whoever that had been behind her. Jorge? Carter? She remembered hearing that Thom couldn't have survived.

The door slammed.

They put her back under again for the operations.

* * *

**She woke up **feeling light and disoriented. It had been many days since she had lost her arm and had the robot one made, but it felt like no time at all had passed between Thom's funeral and now, when she was lying propped up in a hospital bed. The new arm was heavy, and cold where the thumb lightly touched her thigh. The skin where it locked into her shoulder felt raw, and she imagined she could feel the enriched Spartan blood leaking out, looking for veins. Her real arm was somewhere, it had to be. (That _other child_ had it.)

Kat closed her eyes and gave herself a cynical little smile with teeth. Focus.

Kurt came to visit personally after she had recovered enough to stand at attention when the commander of Beta Company entered the room.

Kurt was a Spartan-II, old and tall and, some said, scarred enough that he couldn't remember his name until the army assigned him one. He told her, "You've done good work. How do you feel?"

"I'm ready to go back into the field, sir."

"Yes you are." He paused, walked a few steps across the ward.

There was no such thing as leave for Spartans. She had nowhere to leave to, and she worked just as well with this arm anyway; better, sometimes, since she integrated target sensing and used it like a weapon or a data drive. It wasn't hers, really, anyway. Hers had died with the little black-haired girl.

Kurt left, and Kat lowered her hand from her salute.

* * *

**The last time **she felt out of control was in the run across the ruined landscape of Reach, with the five remaining Nobles unbalanced from the loss of Jorge, and the radiation from the Covenant blasts sending fields and sparks through the smoky air.

The world was shaking, but then she mentally shook herself (one last time) and thought _focus_, and she did. They could do this. She'd taken down Covenant ships before, and this was no different. Six scraped her boot against the ground and Kat put a hand under her elbow to steady her. They kept running on, as coordinated as a wolf pack. She separated from Six and matched paces with Carter and considering that it was the middle of an invasion, everything was all right. She had been built for this. Everything would be _all right_-


	3. Fighting Spirit: Jorge

**Dossier 3: Jorge-052**

_Summary: _ And he wonders what Halsey would think. Jorge, Reach, and Threes trying to get along with Twos. Jorge/Six-ish.

_Security Warning: _Does anyone actually take the thyroid implant thing into account in this fandom? It makes writing pairings really _weird. _Rated K+. The last part is takes place after my story "Solace" and before "If There are Wolves…" . Also yes I am just using every excuse to fit Halsey in because she's so awesome she might get a story of her own…

* * *

_Fighting Spirit _

Spartans never dropped their guard.

The Covenant had swarmed this colony until they'd figured out there was a human in the group who could outlast them all. Then, because the bloody things didn't know what backing down meant, they'd swarmed it some more.

Jorge had a twelve-foot high boulder between him and two Hunters, and a Pelican and a Covenant troop carrier both on the way. No question which one he wanted to see first, but as he circled the stone the Spartan could only think of one thing.

_I live for this._

It was troublesome business, war. Messy as anything, and the UNSC's first priority was to get civilians out of it before things got rough, but he thought that it was amazing that humanity had ever had the technology to build Spartans—to build themselves almost-new bodies and see what evolution might have done if science hadn't caught up to it first. Jorge was good at war.

A Hunter lumbered around the corner, its feet stomping down on the ground and the barrel of its gun staring like a green glowing eye. Jorge could hear the second one and track it on his HUD; it was circling slowly, opposite him.

He clanged his gauntlet against his gun like a medieval warrior with sword and shield. "Come on!"

It did. The Hunter charged and fired and Jorge sidestepped, hunkering down as the plasma heat clipped his side. He didn't need to dance with it; the UNSC had files on all the Covenant alien species. They knew how Hunters worked.

True to form, this one charged past, looking around as if to see where its opponent had gone. Jorge aimed his machine gun at the winkled brown skin under its curved back armor and unloaded.

The Hunter kept turning as its thick hide shredded. Jorge unslung his duel-barreled machine gun and _pushed _against the Hunter's wound as it turned, pushing it over. He propped the gun on his shoulder and killed the Hunter as soon as its face was visible over its massive arm.

_I live for this._

The ground shook; the other one was coming around behind him. He backtracked and circled so that he was slightly out of the line of fire.

His helmet comm crackled. "On our way, Spartan. Clear the drop zone. It's going to get hot real quick."

"Yes sir."

The Hunter charged, its spines rattling.

"I wonder what you're thinking," Jorge muttered as he dodged in one long angle-changing step to its back. The Hunter stopped, the exposed skin beneath its back plates heaving as it breathed.

"What makes you tick?" Jorge rammed his gun against the elephant-wrinkles of its back and killed it like he had the last one.

When he stood up from over the body, he heard the Pelican droning in. He looked up to see it in the distance, drab gray-green wings visible as vague, square buttresses, and behind it, twin purple talons—Banshees.

Jorge started running. The Pelican dropped down on the LZ early, dust billowing around it. Jorge grabbed on and pulled himself into the dark corridor of the carrier filled with human soldiers.

Halsey's voice came over the comm. Although she left most of the commanding to the maries and senior Spartans, she liked to have an ear and a voice on a battlefield when her boys were active. "We've lost this one, Jorge. Return to base."

"Ma'am."

The Pelican pilot joined in on his own channel. "Secure yourselves, people. We're getting out of here."

Jorge kept standing in the open 'Blood Tray', gripping an overhead brace and slinging his weapon in his right hand. "Ready."

They took off and the Covenant ships swooped down on them, taking steep, twisting dive routes to spit keening plasma past the gaps in the Pelican's armor. The marines muttered to themselves and whooped. Jorge's HUD tagged the closest Banshee with tightening red reticules, and he shrugged into a stance meant to take the weight of the gun's kickback. The Banshee zipped past, chased by its spiraling contrails. Jorge tracked it for a second or two before keying in to the trajectory of the second one. Banshee two dove in, trying to juke into place to fire at the innards of the Pelican. The ground rushed by underneath, but Jorge had had vertigo taken out of him. He fired, tearing the glistening purple carapace of the second Banshee's wings.

Another shot pierced the delicate weave of mechanisms underneath, and a fireball bloomed and pulled the Banshee backwards into itself as the Pelican accelerated toward the clouds.

The marines watched the Banshee torn up by the wind and the fire, and someone said, "That's why we've got a Spartan!"

Halsey's voice, soft but commanding. "Stand down, Jorge. This is over."[

He moved back into the Pelican and sat down on the empty end of one of the benches, holding up a placating hand when the marines started to shift over. He spoke for the comm only. "We've cleared out the valley, but they're just going to swarm again."

Halsey said, "It's important now that we get you all out of there. Regroup. We'll strike again when command tells us to."

Jorge settled in, unslinging his pack and resettling his gun across his knees after activating the safety. Marines glanced at him, probably wondering why he was carrying around something usually bolted to the side of a helicopter. "Yes ma'am." She always managed to take the practical route.

A Banshee cruised by at a lower altitude, unable to catch them now, and Jorge tracked it on its HUD without really thinking about it as it crossed beneath their path.

Halsey was the closest thing Jorge had to a mother, unless Deja counted, and it was the same with many of the Spartan IIIs, but she also served in their minds as a drill sergeant or a medic. He thought that if she told him to stand down under fire, he would; she always had some plan in place for the greater good. In that way, he was one of the more innocent of the Spartans.

At the same time, the eyes behind his helmet were unable to see the world except through a screen of experience. He had been in a long list of campaigns, both against the increasingly determined Covenant and against human insurrectionists determined to make this war even _harder. _ He was to be assigned to a new team soon. With fewer and fewer Spartan IIIs in the field, they were rearranged a lot.

The Pelican crested a mountain range and Jorge kept scanning for Covvies chasing after, but the skies remained blank blue.

But he kept his eyes open. Spartans never dropped their guard.

* * *

**Thom was gone** and Noble was left in a bunker near Visegrad to wait for their new recruit. She was flying in from Beta Company, they'd heard, and it would be soon.

"They're a good team," Kat said, lifting her chin in her confident way. Jorge remembered that she had trained with Beta, and wondered if she knew this Six.

Carter said, "She's barely part of the team."

Jorge and Emile, sitting on opposite ends on a table occupied in the middle with supply crates, looked up. _She's gotta be able to work in a team_, Jorge thought. _She's a Spartan. _

Carter continued. "She's trained as a pilot and a sniper, usually gets sent out as recon with the assumption that she's gonna clear up the field on the way. An accomplished soldier. She'll learn."

Emile said, "So she's Jun."

"She's our new Six." Carter stood and went to work at his computer, dismissing Emile by no longer looking at him.

"I'm just sayin' that Thom got himself killed off and there's no guarantee this new kid won't too."

"It wasn't Thom's fault," Kat snapped.

Emile waited a beat before replying, but as usual, he decided to say what he was thinking. "Do you _want _to think it's your fault? I've seen some messed-up psych in my time, but…"

Kat's accent got thicker when she was angry. Her hair was mussed, flat on the top from her helmet, and Jorge thought she looked like an angry eagle. "You're so _tough_, Emile. Really _cool."_

Emile hopped off the table and stomped toward her, and Kat extended her skeletal robot arm to pushed him back away at the same time as Jorge, grumbling, stood up and scooped a hand under Emile's arm to pull him away. The masked Spartan flinched, one coiled thrash that Jorge could feel through the armorweave, like a fish on a hook. Emile looked up. Jorge didn't have to try to loom.

Kat said, "Nobody likes to see the team fight, eh?"

Emile shook his arm out of Jorge's grasp and slammed their gauntlets together, the skull-mark looking out with empty eyes.

"Is this fun for you?"

All three of them turned to see Carter leaning with his arms against a table, his eyes hard and expression unreadable.

Jorge withdrew, stomping back away from Emile, who stood in the middle of the command center and bristled.

Carter said, "If you three want to have a fun fight, we can have a little tournament. If you're actually _arguing_, I have to ask what you think that could possible gain you in the middle of a war."

Jorge's were peacekeeper instincts. "We're quite finished, sir." He stared Emile down to make sure it was true. Kat's gaze bisected theirs on its way to Carter.

Spartans were supposed to have a near-psychic bond within their companies, and perhaps that bond settled over them now as everyone drifted apart and away from the site of the antagonism, as if it was a thing as physical and dangerous as a live grenade. Theirs was a reassurance that they would all be perfectly coordinated in battle, no matter what little spats they went through. It had been close, though. Emile, Jorge thought, needed to be kept track of.

And all this had been over Six; just the new recruit. Not a big deal.

Jorge resettled on his table, and Emile went outside. A few minutes later, the swish-thunk of knives hitting trees could be hard from outside. Carter and Kat started talking quietly. Jorge turned his helmet over in his hands and felt a proper Spartan focus settle over him. They had a mission, and Noble was his team now, no matter how much he missed the Spartan IIIs and marines he used to work with. No need to dwell. No need to compare.

Spartans never dropped their guard.

* * *

**It was, perhaps, **the most beautiful camp on Reach, but Six had no desire to stay there longer than it took to bind plasma burns. Carter had taken three shots to the same spot—scarily accurate marksmanship even for the Elites—which had melted part of his forearm plate to the mesh underneath and burned like hot wax. His arm would be fine, but he was taking a moment to re-secure his armor and take a medpac, and Emile was out collecting ammunition off the beach. The waves curled in on themselves at the edge of the blue expanse of sea.

She was ready to get going and see what could be done about the Covenant super-carrier that had appeared over the Spire just when she thought she'd finished the fight. The Covvies just kept showing hidden hands, overwhelming numbers, surprising tactics.

It had been too long since she flew. She just _itched _for the controls of a Falcon. Noble Team was nice, but…different, from her former iteration as a pilot.

She kept walking. Jorge was sitting on the top of the hill, his helmet by his side in a brazen display of confidence that wouldn't be accepted in the marines—but Carter either hadn't seen or thought they were safe. They'd cleared out the local Covenant a minute ago—and Jorge was taking a moment to look at his world.

Reach was in him, more than any of the others. It was in his voice, in his stride. He was used to this gravity, and had never known Earth like Six had, even for a short time.

But they had sat up together last night with his arms around her and her hands clutching his, Reach and Earth, Two and Three, and silent and sleepy she had felt more comfortable than she could remember in her life.

They hadn't talked about it; there was a mission to get to.

So Six sat beside him on the cool grass and looked out at the sea.

He didn't say anything, but that was his way, and it was comforting nonetheless just to know that his presence was there.

Casually, he broke the silence. "I been thinking. Halsey doesn't know Noble. We ought to join up with her when we're done with this ship. Everybody learn about each other."

Six shifted, remembering when Carter and Halsey had sniped at one another from opposite sides of a protective field and she had felt pinned in place beside Jorge, but at the same time entirely ignored by the pioneering doctor's gaze. She asked, "So what's Doctor Halsey to you?"

Jorge shifted a little too. "Commanding officer. She helped everybody in our company after the procedures went south. Kept our minds on the important stuff, like winning the war."

Six cast back into her formative years. "It was Kurt Ambrose for us. He was a Spartan-II like you."

"I've heard the name."

"He was a good guy. Made hard decisions." He'd been a taskmaster. And he hadn't played favorites. She paused. " I don't think Doctor Halsey likes me."

"Aw, she's just…riled up because the Spartan project was hers. Then they made the threes and suddenly she didn't know everybody any more, she hadn't seen them as hers. It must've been unsettling, suddenly getting a new team you don't know the names of."

_Just like I'm integrating into Noble. _"It is."

"You know our names, Six."

"A nevem Aislinn."

"Huh. Now you speak Hungarian?"

"No. Just picked it up from you."

"Hmm. Halsey might not mind Noble if she gets to know them better."

_Gets to know me better, you mean. Do you want her to know? Want her to approve? _"She minds me. That look…it was worse than when she took the datafile from Kat. I hadn't even _done _anything."

"She's a troubled woman. Hair turned white as soon as she started the project."

_She's their mom. _"Hmm. All right. I just…think it must be weird for her. She treats you like a son and me like an invader, like a Covvie, and I thought she might mind…us."

He didn't turn to look at her. "And what is "us" now, Six?"

Everything in Six's head was pushing her toward the practical. Noble Team regularly split into two-man units for convenience, and when Carter told Jorge to protect her they worked well as a unit; he ploughed into the Covvies and she picked off the ones that were left and the ones farther away. They would likely be assigned together again, since their ranges complemented one another for an equal spread of fire. It was important to get to know Halsey, and to respect her now that Six was under her command. But when she thought about missions she thought about Jorge saying "you can count on me," and when she thought about Halsey she thought about the ice-blue of the containment field.

"Soldiers working together. If Carter sends us out as a team and Halsey's running an extraction or something and…it would be strange."

Everything in Six's head was running at optimal capacity for war, and _something _tied to the memory of Jorge's arms around her and his heartbeat against her back was trying to kick in but couldn't find purchase, and it just left her feeling nauseous and off-balance.

He had been looking down at her for she didn't know how long, and she shamelessly examined the wrinkles around his eyes and his thin lips and the gnarled white scar across his eyebrow. His eyes are bright and flinty and she wondered what he was paying attention to when he looked at her. But then she started thinking that even though he was a Spartan-III there were soft points at his neck, and the armor re-designed for ordinance left his stomach weak, but if she just wanted to kill him from a distance it wouldn't be easy—

He tried to say something to her but it had been taken out of him too. He stood up and patted her on the shoulder hard enough to shake her and stalked across to the other side of the hill to rejoin the others—they should be moving on. She wondered whether there was some sadness in the tilt of his head, because as she resettled her rifle against her lap there was some sadness in the way she looked across the eye-bright sea. It was hard to understand because it was impossible to name, and so instead she lifted her gun and started scanning visual and heat-range for Covenant scouts.

Spartans never dropped their guard.


	4. Commanding Spirit: Carter

**Dossier 4: Carter-A259**

_Summary: _ Carter gave something to each member of Noble Team.

* * *

_Commanding Spirit_

It was Carter's turn to die now.

Carter knew that he had given everyone on Noble Team something to remember him by. Carter was good at being a leader, and he knew that there was a careful balance that a leader had to keep between being friendly and being commanding. Different members of the team needed different things, and without fail Carter knew how to give them.

As much as it annoyed him to think it, Emile was the one most likely to survive. He didn't have anything to live for except for the sort of sibling rivalry he had with death. He just wouldn't let it have the last word. And Six had the AI, so Carter was going to die for them. It was so simple; he had a lot of confidence about it. No stress. It said that in his reports, that he was unlikely to be stressed, and it was true.

They all had to protect Six now, like Thom had tried to protect Kat.

_Carter had given Kat her arm. Not literally, of course, but it was as much apology to her and to Thom that he could do, to visit her while she was recovering. The funeral was a day in the past. She was sitting up in bed, fiddling with the machines. Occasionally her left hand slipped and shook, but her expression never wavered. She took a little emerald-green chip out and kept her face perfectly steady. _

_ A black knob of metal fell out and landed on the bed and Carter grabbed hold of it with one hand and the little compartment it came from with the other. He did not know whether she had feeling in the arm or not (he hoped not because she had dug her remaining flesh fingers halfway into it and even without pain what must that feel like?), but she raised a dark, arched eyebrow. _

_ He held the pin there until she put all the parts back together._

_ Carter had given Jorge thirty credits in a poker game. That was technically a loss, not a gift, but the win had looked so easy for Jorge that it might as well have been._

_ Carter had given Six Jorge's dog tags—although now that he thought about it, she had never offered them to him. Just taken them out and looked at them. _

_ Carter had given Emile a battle to fight and aliens to kill. Although any commander could have done as much, Carter thought that he knew the right balance for Emile as much as for anyone else. There were rules; don't mind that he flips his knife around when he speaks like a pyro flicking a lighter, don't mind that he thinks his mask is his face. Don't look when he holsters his pistol against the magnetic plate on his hip when he's inches from an Elite, just so he can take out that kukri and stab the thing in the neck. Emile was good at war, and they all felt rewarded by what they are good at._

_ Jun is good at sniping and good at mourning, and so Carter gives him the lonely, craggy missions and gives him Six to train to see whether or not she is light on her feet (she is, because she is a Spartan and has had _light on her feet_ wired into the bones of her toes and her heels but she has none of a scout's loftiness). And Carter gives Jun the occasional private channel, just sound pinging between their helmets. _

_ "I'm sorry, sir (_that it took us that long to take out that Covenant-occupied station, or that I couldn't salvage that Warthog, or that I let Thom die.)" _That last one especially, always unspoken but for once. _

_ Finally Carter said, "Never say you're sorry to me, Warrant Officer. Just get the job done."_

_ So then the sniper didn't any more, and for a while it seemed to have bolstered his flagging confidence. (That or the occasional long talks to the crack team of psychologists at Sword Base.) _

_ But therefore, when Kat died and Carter was holding her, letting her cybernetic arm swing like an unclean thing because it was the last part that stopped twitching, all Jun was left with was "I'm…"_

And because of all of that it was okay that he was leaving them. They would remember him, in the eternity of rest. His head was aching and something inside his nose had collapsed when his face hit the helicopter's pilot console. His chest ached and sent spiderwebs of pain into his shoulder through the sinews. It was done, though. He could sit back and accept that it was done. Carter had given what was his as a human and a Spartan to give; service to his fellow men. 


	5. Vigilant Spirit: Jun

**Dossier 5: Jun-A266 **

_Summary: _A moment of silence and the origin of Jun's tattoo. (Maybe.)

_A/N: Argh I'm sorry this one is so bad and took so much time in coming. I just can't find Jun interesting and can't get out of the "let's pair everybody" mentality. ( I ship Jun/dramatically lonely cliffsides.) If anybody's OOC, I'm sorry. I've been reading "let's give Noble Team some happiness, please, and it might end up feeling not like the game at all but there's a great group dynamic anyway" fics.

* * *

_

_Vigilant Spirit_

It was the evening of August eleventh and Noble Team had left Sword Base two nights ago. The fire had been started with a pile of brush and something Emile had done that no one had actually seen him do. It burned bright and slightly acrid-smelling, orange with flickering green at the tips. It bit at the back of Jun's nose as he looked out at the partially icelocked sea, at the almost-white water with winter in its stillness.

Six was watching the fire, leaning against Jorge's arm; Kat and Carter were discussing something quietly, assuming that everyone else would ignore the fact that, although Kat had finished the modifications she had said she was doing on her iron arm half an hour ago, her flesh hand was still clamped around its forearm, and Carter's around her flesh hand. Emile was sharpening his kukri, scraping the edge against a cloth, then his gauntlet, then holding it up to the light. He and Six were the only ones who had kept their helmets on, so Emile looked at his handiwork through skull eyes. Skull. Cloth. Repeat.

And Jun was in love with the view.

They should be sleeping now, all of them except the one on watch. But there was a sense that the morning would come too soon in any sense, that a small amount of time needed to be preserved. That moving too quickly meant forgetting something.

Or maybe that was just Jun. Emile called Jorge sentimental, but Jun knew that he was really the one most due that label—in a pejorative sense, at least. He kept things. He wanted to keep this sky and sea in the back of his mind, to save them for later.

He kept Thom. Kept expecting him to say something, to walk out of the scrub and ask if anything exciting had happened while he had been gone.

"_You weren't responsible_," the doctor had said at his workup. Old doctor, human, male, scraggly white hair at his temples. No more than six feet tall.

"_I could have taken the bomb_," said Jun. "_I could have watched for Kat to fall."_

_"Those are eventualities. No one could have predicted what happened. Your team knows this. This grief will pass. Accept your pain. Talk."_

He did both, and it did not.

He did not blame the doctor.

So Jun went to the crags of his own accord sometimes, called it recon, and the commander used it for recon. And so Jun quipped and asked questions, because then Kat and Carter didn't think he was doing too badly. And so, Jun did not greet the new Noble Six when she first arrived and assumed her quiet way into their team.

He did not know her name, and that was alright. He looked at all of them in turn and saw Thom's coffin, his burial at space. He could shove those thoughts away. He could separate them, instead of making them part of his career like Emile did.

But having this nagging feeling that everyone around him was going to die—was going to try their hardest and noblest and still die and leave him—had to affect a man somehow.

( _Later, so much (little over a month) later, he would look for Carter's eyes behind his mask and hear him say "Take Doctor Halsey and go." He would wonder for a moment whether this was some sort of joke, as the MIA reports came in and kept coming in. Something designed to make him crack again, to stress the fracture points._

_It wasn't. It was just the way of the world.)_

He did not want to think about death, did not want to wonder whether the smell of smoke was from the fire Noble Team had gathered around, or just in his nervous mind. The view of the sea was nice, but it was too empty. He needed something else to occupy him.

He moved back toward the fire, dislodging small rocks from the dirt path. Crouching by the blaze meant that he still had a view out over the cliff.

Jun dislodged the silence like pebbles, sent it tumbling over the bank. "Do you think the Covenant are sleeping now, sir? Do they sleep?"

Carter and Kat sat up straighter. "Of course they do, Jun."

"Upside down," Emile chimed in. "Like bats."

"It's a common misperception," Carter said.

Jun sat down on a rock next to the fire. "I'm not sure that's all that common. I've never heard it before."

Six said, "I heard that if they bite you, you turn into one."

Jun turned around slightly to see Six sit up straight. Jorge was nonplussed. Six's angled orange helmet peered expressionlessly at Jun, but then she gave a little laugh from behind it. "No really, I heard it. One of the marines said so."

Jun said, "I'm just saying maybe we could attack them when they're not expecting. If we're all going to be awake anyway."

Carter said, "We're not all supposed to be awake," but no one seemed inclined to take this as an order. The night was bright and the ice was slowly drifting through the bay. It was breathing time.

Jun found it hard to relax, but he had already cleaned his guns. He could go to sleep now. But miss the view? Miss this camaraderie everyone had found, for some moment of indefinable parameters that were unlikely to be re-created? Even Emile was sitting close, inside the bright halo of the fire.

"Jun," Six said, and he turned again. "I've been wondering." She leaned forward to almost touch the marked skin beside his ear. "Does your tattoo symbolize something?"

Jorge scooped up Six's forearm in one hand and brought her back to his side, where she settled again on the rock and pushed her shoulder against his for a moment. Jun thought of cliffs so high it took a walk to the end to hear a rock dropped at the beginning land. He thought of the three arrows he held clenched in his fists, invisible. Unable to relax, because they were his weapons. _The world he had lost. The UNSC. Thom._

He said, "It's no big deal."

Emile grunted. "He doesn't like to talk about it, but he just woke up one day, and there was Kat with a needle."

Kat hackled and pointed at him with her spindly robot arm. "You want one? Maybe a little heart?"

Emile's response could not be heard over Carter's. "People." It was short but loud.

"What do you want me to tell you?" Jun replied to Emile specifically. "That it was for my mommy?"

Jun didn't wait around for an answer to that. Instead, he picked his way through the rocks back to where he had stood before, and propped his hands on his hips. (There are some things you just don't do in a group of orphaned super-soldiers, and Jun tended to do them anyway. He heard a couple thuds as someone or someones vented their irritation.)

Carter followed Jun. His presence seemed to push both of them farther from the group, out into the realm of "a superior officer making sure his subordinate is fit for combat", and Jun moved over a little, looking down at the landscape far below. He thought of the movement it would take to pull his long-barreled sniper rifle over his shoulder and sight, hands cold on the barrel, if he saw movement down there.

Carter said, "Is this about Thom?"

"Isn't it always?" He would let the commander decide whether that was sarcastic or not.

The commander sounded a little irritated. A _'get that job done quick'-_irritated that didn't really mean anything on the battlefield. "You've got to let it go, Jun. We have a war to win."

Carter had been sympathetic before. Kat had been sympathetic, in the long conversations they had about that last battle. This lack of sympathy was…it was refreshing. It cleared his head a little. He blinked and wondered what Carter read in his expression. (Sometimes he forgot, even after he took his helmet off, that people could see it.) "Yes sir."

And thinking of it as an order made it easier. Then, there was no choice. _Don't regret. Don't think yourself into the past._

Carter tipped his head at him and started back to the little camp. Jun followed.

"It's from something," Six was saying, with Jorge and Kat listening intently. "I swear I've seen that symbol before."

Jun smiled.


End file.
